Milestones and cornerstones: Queering the life course

Rather than refuting or challenging the claims by Baert, Morgan, and Ushiyama to originality, the objective of this commentary is to flesh out “existence theory” by extending its repertoire of examples and by expanding on its classical and philosophical sources. Drawing on precedents in canonical statements by Vico, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and Marx, this response poses questions about the model’s implied assumption of a time-line that traces a “straight” path from the past to the present and future by invoking the alternative imagery of a circular history, cyclical time, or “queer” life course. To support this argument, contemporary queer theories are invoked to supplement the concept-metaphor of “existential milestones” with that of “existential cornerstones,” which do not always suggest that human development follows a single path or a binding timeline. The civil institutions of religion, marriage, and burial, as discussed by both classical sociologists and queer theorists, for instance, may be defined by a sense of necessity and inevitability but also by contingency and coincidence.

A Multipath Cluster-Based Routing Protocol For Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc Network) is a group of mobile network nodes dynamically forming a network without any pre-existing infrastructure. Multi-path routing protocols in MANETs try to discover and use multiple routes between source and destination nodes. Multipath routing is typically used to reduce average delay, increase transmission reliability, provide load balancing among multiple routes, and improve security and overall QoS (Quality of Service). In this paper, the Cluster-Based Routing Protocol (CBRP), which is a single path MANET protocol is enhanced to use multiple paths. The traffic will be distributed among multiple paths to reduce network traffic congestion and decrease delay. An analytical model is used for multipath and single path CBRP routing protocols in MANETs to estimate the end-to-end delay and queue length. The analytical results show that the average delay and average queue length in multipath CBRP are less than the average delay and queue length in single path CBRP.

Reflections on The Four Valleys of Bahá’u’lláh

The Four Valleys was revealed in Bagdad in a mystical language and style, in response to a request made by a prominent Sufi. Yet, despite the traditional Sufi concepts, language, and symbolism employed by Bahá’u’lláh, studying the text in light of the totality of Bahá’í writings demonstrates that its main purpose is to guide the wayfarers to the recognition of the Manifestation of God, soon to be revealed to be Bahá’u’lláh Himself. Furthermore, understanding the text as portraying two complementary paradigms—four parallel paths towards God and the four stages of a single path—leads to integrative and holistic perspectives and practices prescribed in the Bahá’í writings.

BA-MPCUBIC: Bottleneck-Aware Multipath CUBIC for Multipath-TCP

The Congestion Control Algorithm (CCA) in the Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) is fundamental to controlling the flow of data through multiple subflows (SF) simultaneously. The MPTCP CCA has two design goals: first, always ensure better throughput than single path TCP (SPTCP) flows, and second, collectively, MPTCP SFs going through a shared bottleneck (SB) should occupy bandwidth fairly, i.e., close to the bandwidth occupied by an SPTCP flow. Although several MPTCP CCAs exist, they primarily focus on specific scenarios and could not satisfy the design goals in diverse and dynamic scenarios. Recently, CUBIC has become a widely used CCA for SPTCP for its better compatibility with high-speed internet. CUBIC’s effective implementation in the MPTCP is expected to provide improved throughput and fairer behavior, thus satisfying the design goals. However, although the current multipath CUBIC (MPCUBIC) implementation ensures better fairness, it fails to ensure better throughput. We believe the application of same rule for SFs going through an SB and non-shared bottleneck (NSB) makes it difficult for MPCUBIC to adapt to diverse and dynamically changing network scenarios, thus resulting in poor throughput. Therefore, we present an improved version of MPCUBIC, namely bottleneck-aware MPCUBIC (BA-MPCUBIC), to resolve the throughput issue. First, we deploy an innovative bottleneck detection method that successfully differentiates between an SB and NSB based on round-trip-time, enhanced congestion notification, and packet loss. Then, we implement SPTCP CUBIC and MPCUBIC as the CCAs for SFs going through NSBs and SBs, respectively. Extensive emulation experiments demonstrate that the BA-MPCUBIC successfully detects SBs and NSBs with the highest detection accuracy and the lowest detection time compared with other approaches. Moreover, BA-MPCUBIC successfully satisfies the MPTCP design goals in the considered diverse and dynamic scenarios by ensuring both better throughput and fairness.

Modelling Photoionisations in Tautomeric DNA Nucleobase Derivatives 7H-Adenine and 7H-Guanine: Ultrafast Decay and Photostability

The study of radiation effects in DNA is a multidisciplinary endeavour, connecting the physical, chemical and biological sciences. Despite being mostly filtered by the ozone layer, sunlight radiation is still expected to (photo)ionise DNA in sizeable yields, triggering an electron removal process and the formation of potentially reactive cationic species. In this manuscript, photoionisation decay channels of important DNA tautomeric derivatives, 7H-adenine and 7H-guanine, are characterised with accurate CASSCF/XMS-CASPT2 theoretical methods. These simulation techniques place the onset of ionisation for 7H-adenine and 7H-guanine on average at 8.98 and 8.43 eV, in line with recorded experimental evidence when available. Cationic excited state decays are analysed next, uncovering effective barrierless deactivation routes for both species that are expected to decay to their (cationic) ground state on ultrafast timescales. Conical intersection topographies reveal that these photoionisation processes are facilitated by sloped single-path crossings, known to foster photostability, and which are predicted to enable the (VUV) photo-protection mechanisms present in these DNA tautomeric species.

Proxy-Based Adaptive Transmission of MP-QUIC in Internet-of-Things Environment

With the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) services and applications, the efficient transmission of IoT data has been crucially required. The IETF has recently developed the QUIC protocol for UDP-based multiplexed and secure transport. The Multipath QUIC (MP-QUIC) is also being discussed as an extension of QUIC in the multipath network environment. In this paper, we propose a proxy-based adaptive MP-QUIC transmission for throughput enhancement in the IoT environment. In the proposed scheme, a proxy device is employed between IoT clients and IoT server to aggregate the traffics of many clients in the access network. The proxy will transport a large among of traffics to the server, adaptively to the network conditions, by using multiple paths in the backbone network. For this purpose, the proxy device employs a path manager to monitor the current network conditions and a connection manager to manage the MP-QUIC connections with the IoT server over the backbone network with multiple paths. For effective MP-QUIC transmission, the proxy will transmit the prioritized packets to the server using the best path with the lowest round-trip time (RTT), whereas the non-prioritized packets are delivered over the other paths for traffic load balancing in the network. From the testbed experimentations with the MP-QUIC implementation and ns-3 simulation modules, we see that the proposed scheme can outperform the normal QUIC (using a single path) and the existing MP-QUIC scheme (using the round-robin policy) in terms of response delay and total transmission delay. Such performance gaps tend to increase as the link delays and packet loss rates get larger in the network.